Alpine glacial relict species losing out to climate change: The case of the fragmented mountain hare population (Lepus timidus) in the Alps ...
Alpine and Arctic species are considered to be particularly vulnerable to climate change, which is expected to cause habitat loss, fragmentation and—ultimately—ex- tinction of cold-adapted species. However, the impact of climate change on glacial relict populations is not well understood, and specif...
| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Format: | Text |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Wiley
2018
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://dx.doi.org/10.7892/boris.126990 https://boris.unibe.ch/126990/ |
| Summary: | Alpine and Arctic species are considered to be particularly vulnerable to climate change, which is expected to cause habitat loss, fragmentation and—ultimately—ex- tinction of cold-adapted species. However, the impact of climate change on glacial relict populations is not well understood, and specific recommendations for adaptive conservation management are lacking. We focused on the mountain hare (Lepus timidus) as a model species and modelled species distribution in combination with patch and landscape-based connectivity metrics. They were derived from graph-the- ory models to quantify changes in species distribution and to estimate the current and future importance of habitat patches for overall population connectivity. Models were calibrated based on 1,046 locations of species presence distributed across three biogeographic regions in the Swiss Alps and extrapolated according to two IPCC scenarios of climate change (RCP 4.5 & 8.5), each represented by three down- scaled global climate models. The ... |
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